Elden Ring fan spends 500 hours making a low-poly version of FromSoftware's biggest map ever because "I thought it would be cool" – and it definitely is

FromSoftware spent years making its biggest game world ever in Elden Ring's Lands Between, and now one fan of this massive open-world RPG spent roughly 500 hours making a tinier, still-massive, low-poly version of it. And man, it is cool. 

Reddit user and Github creator Honzaap shared their creation with the Elden Ring subreddit over the weekend, and it quickly caught fire among the community. Intrigued by the scale of this thing, flummoxed by their claim that it took 500 hours to make, and oddly nostalgic for a similar "Tiny Elden Ring" previously shared on Sketchfab by Konstantin Chemelev, I reached out to Honzaap to talk through this tiny giant. 

Before that, you can tour the low-poly Lands Between for yourself here. Toggle the camera in the bottom right to get up close and personal. 

I was delighted to learn that I was right on the money: Honzaap says they were inspired by Chemelev's Tiny Elden Ring to begin with. "I just had to see what it would look like with the whole map," they tell GamesRadar+."I will admit that Konstantin's model looks much better, I am not that great with low-poly style." 

"I thought it would be cool if I made this for the whole map," they add. "For positions, I used the in-game map combined with a top-down view map of the actual game, which I found on the lostgamer.io website. They use it for a Geoguesser-like game of Elden Ring. I also used a program called DSMapStudio which lets me inspect the whole map in 3D." 

Where did those 500 hours go? Over the course of around five months, Honzaap says they spent "about 470 hours" actually making the map model itself. "I also included the time I needed to set it up for display on a web page, since I can't just put the entire model there. The most time was spent on making models that can't be reused. Generally those were legacy dungeons, forts, castles etc. There are many things that I had to only make once and then I could reuse them, but placing hundreds of trees, rocks and other stuff takes a